Tea at Trianon: The Invisible War Room Behind Every Democratic Talking Point

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, December 12, 2025

The Invisible War Room Behind Every Democratic Talking Point

From Amuse on X:

Begin with the phenomenon itself. A president warns of a border emergency, within hours Democrats declare it a “manufactured crisis.” A state tightens its voting rules, the same politicians and the same set of networks denounce “voter suppression” and “Jim Crow 2.0.” A Republican appointment or policy is announced, and suddenly everything is framed as a “threat to democracy”. These phrases are not inevitable descriptions of the facts. They are chosen, tested, and distributed. The oddity is not that parties use slogans, it is that the slogans appear everywhere at once, from Senate leadership to cable anchors to mid level influencers with uncanny speed and uniformity.
If we ask how this became possible, we are quickly led to the world of closed listservs that took shape in the mid 2000s. The basic technology was simple, a private email list, but the social innovation was new. A small group of progressive strategists and writers realized that they could turn what used to be informal chatter into a disciplined backroom. The early Townhouse list gathered liberal bloggers, activists, and media figures into a single confidential thread where stories could be pitched, spins tested, and responses coordinated before anything went public. That list set the pattern, a private room where partisans could plan the next day’s narrative while the public imagined they were watching independent minds at work.
The model reached its most famous, and infamous, form in JournoList, a private Google Group created by Ezra Klein in 2007 for roughly 400 left leaning journalists, academics, and policy professionals. Its stated purpose was to discuss politics and the media. Its practical function, as the leaked emails showed in 2010, was often to shape messaging in ways that helped Democrats and hurt Republicans. When Barack Obama’s relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright threatened his 2008 campaign, some participants did not simply analyze the story, they proposed a tactic, pick a conservative critic and call him a racist in order to change the subject and make the controversy about bigotry rather than about Obama’s judgment. Others brainstormed ways to discredit Sarah Palin before she had said much of anything. The point here is not that every member of JournoList agreed with every strategy, it is that a large group of ostensibly independent commentators explicitly discussed how to coordinate lines of attack and defense for one party’s benefit. (Read more.)